


Quiescence

by vailkagami



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-23
Updated: 2017-07-23
Packaged: 2018-12-06 02:09:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11590773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vailkagami/pseuds/vailkagami
Summary: The drums used to drive the Master carzy; now it seems like their absence has the same effect. Shortly after leaving Gallifrey for the final time, he travels to Earth searching for something to fill the silence in his head.





	Quiescence

  1. The mirror is clouded.



It makes no sense. Everything in this room should be the perfect atmosphere, not too cold, not too warm, not too humid, even with the water running and hot. Yet the mirror is clouded, obscuring the image of his face, as if that were required for the demanded perfection. The Master sneers, caught between amusement and annoyance, probably. He can never tell for sure, these days, what he is feeling. If he is feeling anything at all. He swipes the mirror to clear it and the environment gets the clue and the mirror clears.

Following his orders, at least. Obeying him, as it should. As everything should, and yet here he is, master of a vehicle that still has to learn him and of nothing else. That will change soon enough; it must. For now it is all he has, and that is most unsatisfying.

His existence, as it is, has so little impact on time and space that even the Doctor wouldn't notice he's still around, occupying nothing but the space shaped around his own body, the time between heartbeats and breaths taken. There is no one, even, to throw words at. He will not waste words on this TARDIS he has been given. If he speaks, it's to himself, and his words remain contained in the single shape of the speaker and listener, impacting nothing.

Unsatisfying. It makes him want to scream in frustration, this humiliation, this threat of becoming unimportant, but then his own urge makes him want to laugh, because he was given his TARDIS as scraps, as a way to get rid of an annoyance (insignificant), but it is more than he had before, and with it, he can do anything.

Once, he started with less. (That isn't true. He started with a wish and a promise.)

The atmosphere is perfect now, the mirror showing his reflection in sharp clarity, familiar and comfortable but for all his past selves staring at a stranger through his eyes. That, too, is familiar, normal. Something shared by all Time Lords, and “like all Time Lords” is exactly what he doesn't strive to be.

He wondered why they let him live this time. The arrogant part of him that is the part he likes best and the part that always gets in his way (although it is another part of him that always holds him back whenever he has the chance to finally win) likes to think it's because they are afraid of him. Because he intimidated them. Because he is too important to discard. But the silence their drums left inside him when they were finally taken from him is filling itself with the echo this other idea – that they thought him too unimportant to bother killing. That his continued existence is an insult. In the empty spaces, the echo swills until it fills him like the drums once did, and his mirror image sneers at him, angry.

It does not matter, because he will make them regret it. All of them. Eventually. For now he will leave them alone, because they are too unimportant for him to bother. His priorities lie somewhere else.

The door opens to him when he nears it, and the lights in the hall are already on. This new, unfamiliar TARDIS, this stranger, is not fighting him. It never has, was simply a little slow before. He is its master, but he has conquered nothing.

Time to change that. Time to become himself again, and fill the silence in his head with things he _wants_ in there for once. Not invited; he does not invite. He takes.

He conquers, and leaves his mark, and _matters_.

He does not wonder where to start. It has always started (and ended) at the same place for him; there is only one direction he can go. He is still himself, even in the echoing silence, and the empty space left by the drums ( _dum-dum dum-dum_ ) is shaped too much like the sound of a double heartbeat for him not to long for a substitute.

The control room has not been customized yet. He will do it when he has the time. When he has finished his first mission. When he has filled the silence with something else and knows who he is again.

 

-

 

Finding the Doctor should not have been hard at all. He seems to always be drawn to that pathetic century or two on that pathetic planet in the (pathetic) Milkyway galaxy. It is stupid and sentimental, but it makes it easy to track him down. Usually, it's enough for the Master to pick one of the Doctor's favourite decades, set some nefarious plan in motion, and wait for his old friend to show up to stop him.

It's different now. His new, unfamiliar TARDIS won't land with precision where he wants it to, and by the time he finds a spot she will accept, she isn't unfamiliar anymore, or all that new. The console room is still not customized. The Master looks around it with irritation, refrains from kicking the console only because it would be childish and beneath him. This TARDIS is a newer model – newer than any he has commanded before, because the Time Lords do not, as a rule, hold on to old, obsolete versions unless they are sentimental idiots, so he knows there's a reason for her rebellion. Something in the time stream is repelling her. He still blames her because it's his habit to blame and scorn.

Once he leaves the TARDIS and the bubble of space-time surrounding it, he realizes it's not her who was repelled by this time. It was him. Time did not want him to enter this place because he's already here. He cannot put his finger on it, cannot tell where or when exactly he is scheming away on this world, but he feels the disturbance. It's a surprise the modern TARDIS, equipped with all sorts of filters, landed here at all, instead of moving a few weeks in either direction to a point where the other him is either gone or not yet here.

The idea is tempting, to seek out his other, older self, and team up with him, to see if the Doctor is still going to have the last laugh if he's facing two Masters. The idea is also short lived, as meeting himself would mean forgetting the encounter afterwards, until he'll get to live it again in the future. He doesn't want to forget. There is already enough emptiness inside. Echoes. He will have to be careful not to accidentally run into himself, and that means not to start anything destructive on the global scale.

Realizing this comes with some disappointment. The Master considers leaving, coming back at some other time, unoccupied by himself, but that would mean months, maybe years of planning and waiting until the Doctor shows up to fight him. Here, his older self has already done all the work, and likely, the Doctor is already here. The Master simply has to find him, preferably at a moment when his future is occupied elsewhere.

By any chance, his older self remembers this and will kindly back off to give him a chance. He promises himself that he will, when the time comes, and immediately feels a pang of jealousy towards the younger self that took his moment; the younger self that he will be in but a few hours.

Or days. In the end, it takes a while to locate the Doctor, and it is both harder and easier than he expected. The Master starts by looking for signs of disaster that seemed to bear his own mark, and finds none, which means he hasn't really started yet with whatever he will be up to, which means the Doctor is not yet at the site of the Master's activities to be a nuisance. Which means he might not be on Earth yet, or might be anywhere. Which would mean waiting for some disaster worthy of his notice to come up, or just browsing the internet hoping to stumble over a hint of his presence on Earth. The Master does both. He waits for disaster and while he does, he browses the internet of a planet that is by now aware of the Doctor's involvement in almost everything and deeply in denial about it. It's pretty funny, and rather infuriating. When he finds the Doctor, it's through the website of a British university, and he finds him listed on it because apparently the Doctor has been teaching there for several decades, under his usual title, and does, in fact, live on the campus.

How odd. How unexpected, and odd, and remarkably, bafflingly, incredibly stupid.

The Master goes there at once.

 

-

 

The Doctor's TARDIS is still a police box from a decade long past. It's standing in the corner of a specious office in a university building, looking less out of place than it ever has on a street corner of this age. Pretending to be the sentimental antique of an eccentric professor. (It _is_ the sentimental antique of an eccentric professor.)

The Doctor is not inside. The Master knows, because he knocks, and calls, and eventually attempts to set the box on fire, and nothing happens. The Doctor would not ignore him like this, never. The TARDIS is indifferent to his noise and violence, as though she knows that this makes him more angry than any retaliation.

He does not waste any anger on her as she stands indifferent like the piece of junk she is. The TARDIS is here, and so the Doctor will not be far. The Master will wait, and in the meantime he will look around. Who knows, he might find something he can use when he will be back in this time however many years in his future.

The office is of no interest at all. Books. Boring. Photographs of people long lost. Boring as well. He makes sure to remember the faces he doesn't know, for the case that he will run into them one day.

There _are_ faces he doesn't know. It dawns on him that he does not know at which point of the Doctor's timeline he has ended up. It does not matter much, except the Doctor may have an advantage in experience that the Master lacks. Knowledge about the Master from encounters the Master has not lived yet. It makes him pause, makes him reconsider what he is doing.

What _is_ he doing?

He has no plan, not greater objective as of this moment. He wants to conquer the cosmos, yes, and he needs to start somewhere, and that's why he came here. Because he needs to know there's still a point to his effort.

He came for the attention. He wants to be acknowledged.

So he cannot simply leave, as much as that would be the smarter thing to do. If he were smart where the Doctor is concerned, he would be ruler of all by now, and he's too worn down at this moment to pretend.

The silence inside his head has to be filled with _something_. He fills it with the sound of his footsteps as he walks the room, as the walks the halls, as he looks around the campus for anything that may be interesting enough to keep the Doctor in this place for as long as he apparently has been. His heavy steps thunder down the stairs as much as he can make them after he finds a hidden door and a safety mechanism that does not react to his presence. There is nothing at the end of the runnel but a vault, that is big and closed, and clearly the most important thing on this planet at this time.

He knows it, just looking at it. It sends chills down his spine, and a shiver of anticipation. He feels send back in time for a seacond, down his personal history to a day where he broke into a TARDIS scrapyard as a child with Theta by his side and they did not manage to steal anything that day but the possibilities and the crime they were committing, however minor, were thrilling. Now this feeling is out of place and he finds himself throwing his body against the closed vault door, his palms flat against a metal that cannot be found on Earth, begging it to release its secrets.

The door does not open. He tries some combinations, but the lock is quite secure and he does not have the time to play with it for long. (Doesn't he?) He reaches through the walls with senses that humans do not have until he feels the resonance of something on the other side, lying in wait, listening, aware of his presence. He is repelled by it and drawn to it at the same time, in a way that makes him nervous. _Who are you?_ he asks without words. Makes an offer. _I can help you escape._ They have a common enemy, for all he can tell. _Tell me what is going on and I will_ _set you_ _free._

The vault does not speak to him. He waits for a long moment, and hears only silence, and like the silence in his head, it echoes.

There is something else, behind him. Down that corridor, in the dark. He knows what it is, and smiles as he turns from the vault, walking into shadow.

There are more rooms. He did not notice them at first, because the vault filled his senses. The further he gets from it, the freer he can breathe.

Most of the rooms are empty, as if they are waiting for something, or have already lost their use. The passage of time represented in interior decoration – by accident, most likely, meaning nothing. Appropriate, still. To a Time Lord, most rooms are empty almost all the time.

The final room is not; it is occupied by a Time Lord, and that is appropriate, too. There is a narrow bed with a thin mattress, a pile of books beside it, and a pair of sunglasses sitting on top of them. No light. The Master does not need much to see, but it makes the sunglasses look ridiculous.

The Doctor is asleep on the bed, not reacting to the Master's presence at all. He's regenerated at least once since they last met, looks older now, and haggard, and the Master wonders if he's sick because Time Lords rarely ever sleep. He's planning on waking him, with utmost effectiveness. There are so many possibilities, and he stops for a moment, examining them. The Doctor is helpless like this, won't know what is happening until it does. The Master could do anything.

He stands and he watches, and he thinks. The silence is still there but it softened.

Silence is rare between them. They have not had it, it seems, since the academy, since the day they would lie side by side under the orange sky and dream of the stars. It was a long time before Koschei's realized that Theta's dreams were not the same as his, and even longer before he accepted that following his own ideals was more important to the Doctor than being with him. (Perhaps that day of acceptance is yet to come.)

So he stands still now, wanting to stir them into the words and actions that have determined their relationship for so long, and yet unwilling to move. He has no plan, nothing to hold over his old enemy and older friend, nothing for the Doctor to try to talk him out of. If he makes himself known now, he will have to be violent or be prepared to talk, really talk, for the first time in forever, and he finds he does not know what he would say and isn't sure what he is willing to hear.

It is so much easier to just be enemies; a role they have grown into like a caged plant will take the shape of the bars surrounding it.

And yet, he cannot simply leave. He needs validation.

So he stands, indecisive and frozen, just on the verge of action, until the Doctor opens his eyes.

Neither of them moves. The Doctor does not look in the Master's direction. He's staring at their ceiling that for a human would be barely visible in the meagre light. Every now and again, he blinks. It seems to the Master that he is frozen, too.

The Doctor knows he's there. He knows _he_ is there. The Master should be visible just out of the corner of his eye, and yet the Doctor's eyes do not flicker in his direction, not even for a moment. He stares at the ceiling, unseeing, and it's only after a minute that the Master realises that this is _exactly_ what he is doing.

How... interesting. There are not many ways to blind a Time Lord. Most of them would kill a lesser creature. The Master wonders if he had anything to do with it himself, smiles as he imagines that he did. The smile feels weird on his face, and everywhere else.

He moves then, walks across the metal floor with slow, heavy steps. Drags his foot a little so the metal on the sole drags over the metal of the floor, making it screech. Thinks of their time on the Vailant, each step a step back in time, to a moment when the Doctor was in a cage and the Master ruled everything, finally having won, finally _better_. He grins. The Doctor does not move. The Master reaches the bed and sits down on the edge, his thigh pressing against the Doctor's hip, and the Doctor doesn't move.

Finally, the Master places his hand on the Doctor's chest, fingers splayed out, applying just a little too much pressure, and there it is, _dum-dum dum-dum_. There it is.

The Master closes his eyes and sits still for a long moment. It doesn't matter what his face is showing; the Doctor cannot see it, and neither can he.

There is no movement. Everything is still, except the once-empty space inside the Master's head, but it is different now, not the sound he hated, that drove him and drove him mad. (It will still drive him and drive him mad, but he will not hate it.)

It settles in his mind in an act of mutually assured existence and he eventually lets go, only to trail a hand over the Doctor's throat. It's still slender, still squeezable. He trails lightly, and the Doctor closes his eyes, his hearts still a little too fast, his breathing never speeding up. His mind a closed book, a locked diary.

At the end, the Mater leans in and presses his lips to the Doctor's forehead – not as hard as he intended, so it accidentally comes across as tender. “See you later, Doctor,” he says, his grin ringing in his voice as it should.

Then he leaves and the Doctor never says anything or moves, or acknowledges his existence in any other way than by the speed of his heartbeats that the Master can still feel as an echo under his fingertips, ringing through him and finding caverns to nestle in that were abandoned before.

The universe is waiting for him, out there, up there. He strides with purpose.

 

23 July 2017

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story used to be "Silence"; I changed it to avoid having two stories of the same title.


End file.
